Gifts and influence: Conflict of interest policies and prescribing of psychotropic medications in the United States.

ABSTRACT: The pharmaceutical industry spends roughly 15 billion dollars annually on detailing - providing gifts, information, samples, trips, honoraria and other inducements - to physicians in order to encourage them to prescribe their drugs. In response, several states in the United States adopted policies that restrict detailing. Some states banned gifts from pharmaceutical companies to doctors, other states simply required physicians to disclose the gifts they receive, while most states allowed unrestricted detailing. We exploit this geographic variation to examine the relationship between gift regulation and the diffusion of four newly marketed medications. Using a dataset that captures 189 million psychotropic prescriptions written between 2005 and 2009, we find that uptake of new costly medica

SUBMITTER: King M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5154797 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature